“Then there’d be no record. The sea keeps what it takes, more often than not.” He said it without cruelty, as a fact of the coast. “But it does give things back, sometimes. Months later, sometimes years. The currents are strange along here—things wash south when you’d expect them north, and the reef channels push everything sideways.”
“The reef channels.” She looked at him. “Here? At Blackscar?”
“Blackscar’s the worst of it. The reef runs a mile out and bends south, and anything that gets pulled into the channel between the reef and the shore gets pushed along the coast like water through a pipe. If something went in near Holy Island, it could end up anywhere between here and Craster.”
She considered this. The geography of it arranged itself in her mind alongside the chart she had seen in the keeper’s logbook—the reef drawn in careful ink, the channel marked with depth soundings, the current arrows that showed the water’s path along the shore. She had studied it one morning while he was on the knoll, and she had traced the arrows with her finger, and she had not let herself think about what they meant until now.
“Mr Shaw, if I wrote letters of inquiry to the harbourmasters at Beadnell and Bamburgh, would you carry them?”
“I would. I pass through Beadnell every Thursday and Bamburgh every other week.”
“I would be very grateful.” She rose from the bench. “And if you hear anything—in any village, from any source—about a young woman, fair-haired, twenty-one, who was lost along the coast a year ago last April—”
“I’ll send word up the hill.” Shaw picked up his bread again. “I hope you find her, miss. Or find what happened.”
“Thank you, Mr Shaw.”
She left the Anchor and stood in the harbour air, the sea before her in its flat grey patience, and the coast curving south, and somewhere along it the water moving throughchannels that connected one stretch of shore to the next like the passages of a building whose doors had not yet been opened.
Hewasonthebeach when she found him.
The tide had pulled back far enough to expose the wrack line—a dark ribbon of kelp, driftwood, and debris that the sea deposited with each cycle and that he harvested every low tide for the pyre. She stood at the cliff edge and watched him work below.
He moved along the shore with the systematic attention she had come to associate with everything he did. Each piece of timber was assessed, lifted, turned, and either added to the growing pile at the base of the cliff path or discarded. The useful pieces he stacked perpendicular to the tide line, so they would not be reclaimed if the water turned early. The rejected ones he left where they lay. He wore no coat. His shirt was dark with spray and sweat, and the wind off the water drove his hair flat against his skull.
It looked like heavy work. The timber was waterlogged, swollen with salt, and he carried each piece the length of the beach to the pile rather than dragging it, because dragging filled the grain with sand that would spit and crack in the fire. She knew this because she had asked, two days ago, why he carried when dragging was simpler, and he had looked at her as though she had asked why the sky was above them rather than below, and he had explained the sand problem with the resigned patience of a man who had accepted that his solitude had been replaced by questions.
She descended the cliff path.
“The wrack is thin today,” she said, reaching the sand.
He straightened from a length of oak that had been stripped white by the water. “It is.”
“There is more on the spit.” She pointed south, where the sand curved outward in a narrow tongue toward the reef. A scatter of timber lay along its outer edge—darker pieces, larger, the remains of something that had been built rather than grown. A crate, perhaps. Or a section of hull.
He glanced where she pointed and turned back to the pile. “I see it.”
“You are not going to collect it?”
“Not today.”
“It is better timber than anything here. That looks like oak planking.”
“It is oak planking. And the spit covers on the flood tide in approximately forty minutes, which is not sufficient time to reach it, assess it, and carry what is useful back to the path.” He lifted the stripped piece and added it to the pile. “I do not fancy being stranded by the tide, Miss Bennet.”
She looked at the spit. The sand was dark and wet, and the water at its edges had the shallow, deceptive clarity of a surface that would deepen without warning. The reef lay beyond it, its teeth just visible above the low water, and between the spit and the reef, the channel ran dark and fast.
“You know the tides here.”
“I know the tides everywhere within several miles of this tower. It is my business to know them.”
“And the currents? The channel between the reef and the shore?”
He stopped. The piece of timber in his hands was a length of pine, half-rotted, barely worth carrying. He held it anyway, and she saw him deciding whether her question was practical or something else.
“The channel runs south-southeast at flood and reverses at the ebb,” he said. “The flow accelerates where the reef narrows between the northern and southern spurs. Anything caught in the channel at flood tide is carried south toward Craster. At ebb, it comes back north, but the reef deflects it, and most of what the channel takes ends up on the beaches south of here rather than on ours.”
“So, the wrack that arrives on this beach comes from the north?”
